Self-Hosted Main

Trust me you do not want to point an MX record at your houses IP. It’s a terrible idea, dont do it, I don’t have the energy to qualify that statement but just trust me, don’t.

https://mailbox.org/ and https://tuta.com/ are pretty neat providers.

After hosting my own email in the 1990s-2010s, I've been cured of that and rather give some dedicated vendor a few bucks a year to take care of all the headaches for me.

Exchange

Might not be the answer you are looking for: I would strongly advise against self-hosting your main email, especially if you are thinking about doing it on an IP address from a residential ISP or VPS/cloud provider. Unfortunately those kind of addresses have bad reputations for spam, and you will run in to significant deliverability issues at minimum. Some providers flat out block port 25, which makes sending and receiving unauthenticated email impossible (which is required to operate an “email provider”).

MXroute

Postfix or opensmtpd and dovecot probably

I found a lot of good info in r/degoogle and r/privacy

Ended up with MailFence

Rather than self host, I switched to Protonmail. I use a custom domain with catchall addresses enabled, so I can have an arbitrary number of email addresses grouped by what service it relates to, along with plenty of filtering and organization rules. So far it’s been nothing but upside, honestly.

Maddy self hosted + Blue mail as client for phone. But be ready to be DMARC compliant :) not difficult just annoying.

Zoho.

5 usd a year vpc.. and host your own domain and mailserver

Purelymail.com -- based on a similar thread here 6 months ago. They are very affordable, and I have 5 different domains hosted with them. They only bill based on traffic and storage. I liked being able to have multiple domains without any additional charges.

If you self host you are at the behest of your domain registrar.

Zextras Carbonio [ https://zextras.com/carbonio ] self hosted all the way.

Personally I DO self-host... and I have very few problems. I get blacklisted occasionally but it's not been a huge concern and is usually only the low-priority blacklists... I did have to go through jumping through hoops early on to get my IP accepted but I haven't had problems in years.

For my mail server these days I use Docker Mailserver. It's really complete as a server (no frontend though) for setting up a really good IMAP/SMTP server. I have a full docker swarm cluster running here that keeps it VERY reliable. For a frontend on my desktop I use Evolution or Thunderbird (I'm a Linux user).

For a web frontend I have a few I have played with. My current "primary driver" is Snappymail acting as a plugin to my NextCloud instance. However I've had good experiences using E-Groupware which is VERY feature complete as an Outlook alternative.

Hope that helps!

self hosted mailserver here (on an old, dedicated vps)... just dovecot/postfix/mysql and the usual (amavis & spamassasin) - if i need to add/edit/delete users or domains, that's just a bash script.

there's lots of other options already mentioned, but you could also consider aws for this: you set your domain up with them (or verify it), set SES to forward inbound mails to wherever you want, and set your mailclient to send out through ses.

antispam & dkim/dmarc/spf included.

The problem with selfhosting email, is that unlike other self hosted things, it lives in a distributed system. It has to talk with other mail servers and they have to talk back. The second part is hard due to spam measures...

For just the software side, you have a few options. Mail cow, iRedmail, and Mailinabox are very popular. Linuxbabe has instruction on how to build it from scratch using postfix. (Good to learn, but a LOT of work) But recently I stumbled on Modoboa. It does not need docker, so you can run it alone. It is not split foss with everything good behind a paywall. And it does not install unneeded apps like DNS for no reason. But keep in mind that I have only evaluated it so far and not yet put it in production.

Now for the other needs... To receive mail, you will need a static IP. Theoretically, you can get by with a dynamic DNS, but it will not go well. Your IP will change, and it will still be cached and you will lose email.

To send mail... (This is a lot more) You will need a clean static IP, with a fqdn and ptr record matching. It will need to be clean, and not in a blocked range of IPs. You will also need SPF and DKIM records, and may need dmarc. And you will need to warm up the mail server and maintain it's cleanliness. Or you can contract out your outbound to other companies like MXroute. If you farm out your outbound, it eliminates most of the complaints above. If you have the skill, you may be able to only route Microsoft and Google destined email, and direct deliver the rest yourself. (I am working on this)

iCloud mail is working great for me and it's totally free. Apple does the hosting, you'll need to own your own domain, and you can use one email address with it (not sure if here is a way around that).

Disagree with 99% of the other posts. If you self-host your email it is archived on your system. So-called “private” email isn’t after 6 months in the US. And it is more stable and higher performance to run my own Roundcube webmail on my own server. And I can control the spam filtering. All reasons to host your own.

However there is some “maintenance” involved with unscrupulous black list sites and overzealous email filter software. Google likes to declare basically everything not coming from their buddies as spam Microsoft wants you to kiss the ring. On a work account just this week I tried contacting a German company called Beckhoff and after just 3 “dead” email accounts from previous contacts they decided to ban my entire company (about 100 employees, been in business over 75 years). They also don’t answer their phones. Not sure if they’re still in business or just being German jerks. As a result of their poor performance we may switch to a competitor. I do not put up with that crap.

Also I’m not sure how to phrase this politely but despite promises unless you are using PGP to end-to-end encrypt your email, and even then it’s not 100%, you can’t ever totally make it private. Also it is impossible to totally ensure identity of the sender although we’ve come a long way. Protonmail recently published how they delivered a criminal to the authorities using the small amount of public information they log.

As a result I do agree that you should let someone else deal with the black listers, bans, etc. But I strongly disagree with keeping it on a remote server more than about 10 minutes. That means one of three options (for receiving:

1. If you have a static ipv4 IP use the email service on Cloudflare to act as a mail relay and forward email to your server. Thus Cloudflare’s reputation not yours is what matters.
2. If you don’t have a static address, you can rent a VPS. Low end box (lowendbox.com) has some great coupons all the time. You can get easily under $12/year. In this case tunnel from your actual server to the VPS. We really don’t “need” the VPS.
3. Pay for a forwarding server. I used Dynu in the past. Never had an issue. It was I think $10/year. Again this assumes you have an accessible server on a static or dynamic ip. And you are basically paying for what Cloudflare does for free.
4. Pay for webmail. Again Dynu is $20. Then just program your local webmail to call imap and download everything say every 5 minutes. But it limits you to ONE user or each user doing their own thing.

On server dovecot and sendmail work well. Roundcube looks exactly like an improved gmail.

For sending I use smtp2go. At my low usage entire family is free.

I really like Zoho mail. It’s free to setup with your own domain email. I get 5 inboxes for free, which would be enough for a small business. They get 5GB of storage for free. They don’t allow mail clients to be used outside of their own mail clients which is good enough for me unless you pay a subscription. They have both a desktop and mobile app for their mail service.

So far, I’ve used it for personal business and it’s not getting spammed to death. I would love to start a business by providing IT applications, mail setup services and hardware services for existing local businesses.

If you're not hosting yourself (don't), Zoho is my suggestion.

On-Prem Exchange Server. Way better than anything else.

Self hosting with mailcow.

Alternatively proton.me

Eh Exchange

I use postfix, dovecot and snappymail. Very happy.

I already had a well-configured postfix (DKIM, DMARC) for web applications, so adding dovecot was easy. It's also really powerful, you can define who gets mailboxes in scripts. I tried going with providers but I couldn't get this kind of power.

Fastmail, all the way